(Continued from page 24)

Estonia's capital of Tallinn was known as Reval during Tsarist times and members of the Benckendorff family had served as military commanders there since the middle of the eighteenth century.  Russia's revolutionary armistice had been signed in September of 1920 leaving Lenin's Bolsheviks in firm control, so it appears that in the following year the very monarchist Benckendorffs headed back to the family's hometown... away from a régime that they despised.

It was during 1939 in Tallinn that our Alexei made the funeral arrangements for his foster mother.  The wife of the farmer who had been instructed by the Cheka executioners to put Alexei's blanket wrapped body on his cart had died at the age of seventy-four after caring for the Tsarevich since the murder of his family twenty-one years earlier.  He buried her under the pen name he was using of Tammet and that name appears on the death certificate.  However, funeral notices that were printed in the newspapers of the time show that she was born with the more familiar family name of
von Benckendorff-Känna.

The Benckendorff family genealogy does suggest that Paula may have been one of Count Paul's many cousins.  She had moved to Ekaterinburg with her husband, three sons, and a daughter at the outbreak of the Great War to get away from the fighting.  It was only a few months before the Bolsheviks had moved their Imperial prisoners to Ekaterinburg that Paula's son Ernst had died of typhoid fever.  He was less than a year younger than the Crown Prince and by the middle of the next summer Alexei had taken Ernst's place in the family.  Recently, Paula's grandchildren were located in Estonia by Helle Tamm and they told her that while they knew something about the foster son they did not know of his identity or the Benckendorff connection.

The next obvious question is: How does the teenage heir to Russia's Imperial throne manage to be passed from the rescue efforts of Count Paul Benckendorff on one side of the execution to the farmhouse of Paula von Benckendorff-Känna on the other, while the rest of the world is led to believe that he is dead?  One can only imagine that there must have been some sort of collusion by the Bolshevik government in the middle.  But why?

There is still one more member of the military Benckendorff clan who might prove to be another missing piece of the puzzle and this one is at the very pinnacle of the German Command.  Kaiser Wilhelm II spared no effort trying to rescue his Russian Imperial cousins from the clutches of the revolutionaries even though their countries were at war with each other.  His General Chief of Staff was an old Prussian by the name of Field Marshall Paul Hindenburg... the very same man who would later be forced by circumstances to hand over the reigns of Germany's government to Adolf Hitler.  When the Kaiser gave command of his armies to Hindenburg the journalists in Berlin had trouble finding his military record.  The reason for this was that his record was not filed under the name of Hindenburg.
© J. Kendrick 1997                                                                                                                                    (Continued on page 26)